tude to the contributors for the invariable kindness with which they have met my requests for dovetailing and keying - on. At any rate, the whole, whatever may be its faults, has been planned as a whole from the beginning, and executed as a whole to the end. In so vast a scheme there must be flaws and dropped stitches. I know some individual writers whom I myself miss; and I am prepared for the charge that we have been unjust to the minor countries-to Portugal perhaps most of all. But it is difficult to do everything; and we have done what we could. If we have not dealt (as some would have had us deal) with everything that literature is about, as well as with literature, I do not think we are much the worse for it.

The volume which follows necessarily differs, in more than a single point, from most, if not all, of its predecessors. There is, in the first place, the onerous obligation, not merely as in the former cases to sum up with a "Pisgah-sight" of literature in the different countries for the period, but to out-Pisgah Pisgah and re-" survey with" more "extensive view" the survey of those periods themselves. It may well seem to some that this is too ambitious an enterprise-that it wants the means, and tempts the fate, not merely of Moses but of Icarus. But it seems to me that the scheme would be incomplete without it-nay, that a person who was afraid of it had no business to undertake that scheme at all. And so, with all invocation of the Muses and all deprecation to Nemesis, I shall yet dare the attempt.

Another condition of difficulty is the further increase of a general disability, which has rested in increasing measure upon every writer in the successive volumes of the book. We have contracted our range from more than half a millennium in the first volume to little more than half a century in the last; and yet this contraction, as everybody can apprehend at once, has not kept pace, and could not possibly keep pace, with the growth of material. In all the later volumes, and in this more than any of them, it has been necessary to omit much, to take much by representation and in sample, to deal summarily even with consummate examples. And in this, as in the volume immediately preceding it,1 this necessity is made more awkward by an increasing familiarity on the part of the reader both with the subjects that are and the subjects that are not dealt with. I cannot hope to enjoy many readers who will be so sweetly reasonable as to take my estimate of the room allottable to this country, this department, this writer, as the right one. I can only say that I have used the best of my judgment in the matter-bad as that best may be, or at least

seem.

The revival of some literatures which had made little show for a time, and the actual entrance of some which had hardly before been admitted, as Hoffähig in European literature, made another aggra

i Which, partly owing to the accidents of the subject, but also by design, to give more room here for the Conclusion, contains not a little work belonging to us.

vation of the difficulty; but there was only one rational way of overcoming this. In the earlier volumes of this series which I have myself written, as well as in all other works of literary history in which I have been engaged, I have sedulously eschewed translations. Here, in the case of Russian, of Norwegian, and of some other divisions, I have not hesitated to use them as the foundation-with this due warning-of even a critical judgment. And I do this with the less hesitation, inasmuch as it is perfectly notorious that the extremest Ibsenomania or Tolstoyolatry is compatible with an inability, at least as complete as mine, to read a single sentence of Russian, or to do more than spell out Norse. What I have said of translation I may also say of secondhand knowledge, not derived even from translation itself. There is not very much of this in the book; but there is necessarily some.

One anomaly may (or must) strike careful readers; and I shall confess it as such at once. The objection to mentioning living persons in a general history of literature, or of anything else, is with me most sincere and most strong. But it applies chiefly to our own countrymen; and with less and less force to foreign countries which have more and more distant intercourse with ours. The distinction is not an idle one; it is simply the other good old rule of "present company" transposed into a new set of conditions. Moreover, it so happens that in some literatures of Europe, owing to causes political and miscellaneous as well as purely literary, a very distinct fresh start

In

was made in the fourth quarter of the century, after something of a stationary state in the third. Germany, for instance, the limitation, though it would have given us Nietzsche, would have left us hardly anybody else who had not been already mentioned in Mr Omond's volume; and so elsewhere. While to pass from places to influences, it would have been impossible to complete the quartette or quadrilateral of Zola-Ibsen-Nietzsche-Tolstoi, which is so remarkable, with its most agreeable and not its least important angle; or to show how the influences themselves have worked abroad, where a very large part of the actual literary product is due to them, while with us it has been very much smaller, and in real importance less even in proportion to its bulk. It will be found, therefore, that in English only one or two living persons, and those of the highest and longest standing, are so much as named; in French few, but only a few, more; while in the other countries the etiquette has not been allowed to effect exclusion of anybody who seemed to the writer proper to be mentioned for the purpose concerned. And if this inconsistency offends any one I shall be sorry; but I cannot pretend to be very penitent.

In conclusion, I hope it may not be impertinent or nauseating to say a very few more words about the general purpose of this History of European Literature-which will, I trust, some day drop the "Periods" necessitated by the scheme of its appearance and challenge its proper position as that "New Hallam which was announced in its prospectus.

Some have described these volumes as "schoolbooks," and others have been good enough to call them a "popular series." We certainly must have attained a pretty high state of culture as a nation if they are either one or the other. It was, indeed, the editor's hope in planning the book originally, and is still now as he takes leave of it, that it may be of the greatest value to students, whether in the highest forms of schools, in universities, or in subsequent and private pursuit of knowledge. He would also have much liked to think that people might take the volumes home from the library instead of novels or travels. But what they were chiefly planned to do was to supply intelligent possessors of larger and smaller collections of literature with something like an atlas or dictionary of the subject, aiming rather at the connection and ensemble of the atlas than at the scrappiness and broken lights of the dictionary. In so far as they do this, they will have achieved their main object: it would be a pity to think it an object out of, or above, practical book-politics.1

1 Most of the contributors to the earlier volumes have been good enough to give me some assistance in this by proof-reading. And outside our own circle I owe special thanks to Mr Edgar Prestage for the contribution inserted and acknowledged in its proper place, as well as to Dr K. Breul and one or two others for help of various kinds.

EDINBURGH, Midsummer Day, 1907.